31E40100 History of Economic Growth and Crisis

Great course. It was really cool to see how to empirically test theories about why cultures succed and go wrong (economically) and how past actions and incidents influence our outcomes today.

Very systematic and practical approach. Would perhaps have appreciated a chance to do similar empirical work of my own, instead of just studying about how others did it in the paper and how to decipher their methods.

Chitrak | 8.4.2015 @ 12:59

Excellent course! You can tell that Sarvimäki loves giving lectures and puts effort into it. Great insight into the logic of economic research. The course supports Applied Microeconometrics I well, as you see how the methods are practically applied in studies.

The course feels a lot easier if you attend the lectures. A lot of information is covered, but in the lectures Sarvimäki does a good job of explaining what are the key points and how they relate to each other. This is not as obvious if you just read the slides on your own, as I found for a couple lectures that I couldn’t attend.

The workload isn’t too bad –two essays that take about 1-2 days to write if you want to do well. I’d recommend that you read the papers thoroughly a couple days before writing the essay to digest the information. Once you’ve got the main points figured out, the writing bit is a pleasure!